Wednesday, September 10, 2008

What would you like to hear my thoughts about?

I'm trying to get back into the swing of posting, and I'm trying to figure out what to post on. I've got a whole slew of things bouncing around in my head, and I figured I'd offer you, that is, anyone who is still following my blog after the long dry spell, a chance to weigh in on what I should write about first.

I could write reviews of programming books for a few years. I read a lot, especially old stuff, much of which is under $5 used these days. Do you want to hear about my favorite books? What subjects? Compilers and interpreters? Lisp? Writing good code? Designing programs? Old programming languages?

I have a hypothesis that programming salaries (and all technical salaries) are going to go up again, and a few links to news stories that I might be able to weave into a cogent argument. Any interest?

I spend a lot of time looking into my crystal ball wondering what will happen if/when the relentless increase in Mhz stops. Do you care what I see?

I love strange and forgotten corners in the world of programming. How do you implement recursive functions in an interpreter that's purely functional? How do you optimize tail calls in a language with dynamic scope like Logo? How do you handle functional arguments and functional values in a dynamically scoped language like Lisp 1.5? What if you want to use shallow binding? I've never had any use for any of these tricks, but I still find them endlessly fascinating. Am I the only one?

I can complain about some common excuses that people use to make stupid decisions.

I can talk about my own opinions on how to write good code.

I can talk about some of my favorite themes that keep appearing over and over in the history of programming.

I can do a series of posts about Microsoft. History, practices, ways that I see them preparing for the future, strengths and weaknesses, predictions, etc.

I can talk about the good old days online (before the web), and all the things that are worse now. I could talk about the things that are better, but I'm not sure there's a point. You probably know them already.

I could go on, but that's enough to get started.

1 comments:

Jon T said...

All of it sounds great, honestly. To start...

> what will happen if/when the relentless increase in Mhz stops

... sounds interesting.

> themes that keep appearing over and over in the history of programming

I think this would be great, esp. since it seems you know a lot more history than the rest of us.